Social infrastructure and social capital – the active elements of community resilience
What role does social infrastructure play in strengthening community resilience? To investigate, ICON asked the academics Adam Coutts and Diego Mauricio Diaz Velásquez to conduct in-depth review of the evidence on social capital, social infrastructure and resilience.
This review identifies the active elements through which social infrastructure builds community resilience. Physical spaces create platforms where false narratives can be challenged through face-to face dialogue rather than spreading unchecked through social media echo chambers. When communities regularly interact in markets, parks, and community centres, park runs, and wet Wednesday nights at the local football pitch, concrete human relationships are formed that prove resilience to disruptive external forces whether social, economic or political.
They argue that social infrastructure represents not optional amenity but national and local democracy's foundational requirement for building civic resilience. In the current challenges seen for community resilience across the country, we cannot solely ‘tech’ our way out —we must build the physical spaces where democracy's messy, essential networks of integrating different perspectives and people through constructive engagement can occur. In doing this, we will strengthen our neighbourhoods upon which our nation’s resilience depends.
Adam Coutts is a Research Fellow at University of Cambridge and Public Policy Specialist, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Diego Mauricio Diaz Velásquez is an academic at Fundación Universitaria San Martín and Universidad Mariana, Columbia
The ideas set out here belong the authors and so should not be ascribed to the Commission as a whole, or to any individual Commissioners or their associated organisations.
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